Ethan Frome eBook

When Ethan was called back to the farm by his father’s
illness his mother gave him, for his own use, a small
room behind the untenanted “best parlour.”
Here he had nailed up shelves for his books, built
himself a box-sofa out of boards and a mattress, laid
out his papers on a kitchen-table, hung on the rough
plaster wall an engraving of Abraham Lincoln and a
calendar with “Thoughts from the Poets,”
and tried, with these meagre properties, to produce
some likeness to the study of a “minister”
who had been kind to him and lent him books when he
was at Worcester. He still took refuge there in
summer, but when Mattie came to live at the farm he
had to give her his stove, and consequently the room
was uninhabitable for several months of the year.

To this retreat he descended as soon as the house
was quiet, and Zeena’s steady breathing from
the bed had assured him that there was to be no sequel
to the scene in the kitchen. After Zeena’s
departure he and Mattie had stood speechless, neither
seeking to approach the other. Then the girl
had returned to her task of clearing up the kitchen
for the night and he had taken his lantern and gone
on his usual round outside the house. The kitchen
was empty when he came back to it; but his tobacco-pouch
and pipe had been laid on the table, and under them
was a scrap of paper torn from the back of a seedsman’s
catalogue, on which three words were written:
“Don’t trouble, Ethan.”

Going into his cold dark “study” he placed
the lantern on the table and, stooping to its light,
read the message again and again. It was the
first time that Mattie had ever written to him, and
the possession of the paper gave him a strange new
sense of her nearness; yet it deepened his anguish
by reminding him that henceforth they would have no
other way of communicating with each other. For
the life of her smile, the warmth of her voice, only
cold paper and dead words!

Confused motions of rebellion stormed in him.
He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap
of living, to submit so easily to the destruction
of his hopes. Must he wear out all his years at
the side of a bitter querulous woman? Other possibilities
had been in him, possibilities sacrificed, one by
one, to Zeena’s narrow-mindedness and ignorance.
And what good had come of it? She was a hundred
times bitterer and more discontented than when he
had married her: the one pleasure left her was
to inflict pain on him. All the healthy instincts
of self-defence rose up in him against such waste...

He bundled himself into his old coon-skin coat and
lay down on the box-sofa to think. Under his
cheek he felt a hard object with strange protuberances.
It was a cushion which Zeena had made for him when
they were engaged-the only piece of needlework he had
ever seen her do. He flung it across the floor
and propped his head against the wall...